The Posner-Stone Debate You've Been Waiting For

By popular demand, we present a long-delayed podcast. One January 31, 2006, the Law School chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union presented a debate entitled "Presidential Power in an Age of Terror:  A Debate on NSA Wiretapping." The participants were Hon. Richard Posner of the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (and also one of our Senior Lecturers) and Geoffrey Stone, Harry Kalven, Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Law, and the debate was moderated by Joseph Margulies, trial attorney and Lecturer at the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Chicago Law School. The event was exceedingly well attended and quite fascinating, but it has taken a while for us to bring it to you due to a corruption in our recording. We're providing it because we've been asked for it several times, but we need to warn you that sound quality is poor and the file is huge (the corruption prevented us from compressing it properly). If you can put up with all that, we promise you a treat, and you can listen here. As always, instructions for those who are new to podcasting are here.

Comments

[Kimball Corson]

The interesting aspects of this debate for me were the struggle of both participants to place their analysis in a concrete technological context, to identify the level of urgency and value of the prospective information, and the level of Fourth Amendment protections to then be afforded in that context, all in light of the fact this war on terrorism is going to be a continuing one. To amend FISA to deal with this collection of problems is going to be tricky. Perhaps in addition to a court of review, an independent prescreening panel to gather this information and to make a reviewable assessment of these factors in advance of, and then again 15 days after the beginning of surveillance is also needed. Without such independent fact gathering, judicial review is left to a relative assessment of hyperbolic argument and undue speculation.

[Kimball Corson]

P.S. It was also fun for me to hear a classmate debate with one of our former teachers. Both did a great job.